WSB Q/A with the mayor: #4 – ‘No parking, there’s transit’

We heard that response a few times during our recent one-on-one interview with Mayor Ed Murray, including when we asked about a development-related issue that has roiled some neighborhoods around the city, including here in West Seattle: No offstreet parking required for housing built within a few blocks of “frequent transit.” That’s led to plans including the just-approved 6917 California SW 30-apartments, no-parking-spaces building whose land-use sign drew a frustrated scrawl last fall:

The no-parking (or handful-of-spaces) trend has been especially noticeable in the medium-sized projects lately, such as 40 units and 5 spaces at 4439 41st SW. But even as the city says “OK, there’s frequent transit, you can do it,” the transit agency – Metro – is warning of cuts. So, we asked the mayor, what does he think about the city allowing parking-free projects without being able to guarantee transit availability?

More Democratic idiocracy that does not take into consideration REAL WORLD behavior. People WILL have cars. There are many places people need to go that are not served by Metro. These units will have cars “tied” to them that will spill over into the streets. The parking issue will continue to be a problem. More “solutions” with worse repercussions.

This has nothing to do with political parties – it has to do with a disconnect from reality that permeates both parties, and which completely permeates Seattle’s constant embrace of passive-aggressive behavior and the willingness to accept this mayor’s nonsensical placations that are meaningless. Did he give a timeline for this “looking at things”? Nope. Did he specifically address the issue? Nope. Did he explain why in the world it is acceptable AT THE PRESENT to allow buildings to be built without any parking at all? Nope. He admits that our public transportation system is inadequate, but refuses to explain why with the inadequacy in existence, that inadequacy should be ignored for the next 20 years or more while he and other placators sit around and talk about how the lack of public transportation options might be fixed. And as Bob points out, even people who regularly use public transportation have cars to get to places not served by public transportation and they need parking! I’m betting Mr. Mayor uses a car every single day to get to and from work and do his job. Does he walk or bike or ride the bus to get to the various points around the City every day for his assorted commitments? No he does not. So apparently he should have access to a car to conduct his business and he has parking at his residence to house his personal vehicle, I am sure, but the rest of us don’t need it. Talk about the height of political hypocrisy.

But more than any of that – why was he allowed to get away with making such meaningless statements by this interviewer? Why didn’t he/she (I can’t tell from the audio) push back and make him actually provide a meaningful answer about why apartment buildings without parking were being permitted and built NOW?!? Because THAT is the question – not what he and other political hacks might be talking about at their next meaningless and indecisive meeting. The buildings are being approved now and we deserve answers. There were absolutely no answers whatsoever provided here in this “interview”. Words were spoken but no answers were provided.

It ABSOLUTELY has to do with politics. Seattle is a one political party city. They push metro, even though it is not cost effective as the ONLY solution, TO EVERYTHING. They threaten it (service) at a drop of a hat – “think of the children” and then make laws/rules/exceptions as punishment (“if we do not raise taxes we cancel service”, “we need higher density and cheaper housing”) etc. WITHOUT taking into account HUMAN NATURE AND NEED.

Metro does not go everywhere. it only goes to certain places. Then what? How are people supposed to get around past that point? They need cars, which this city is doing everything it can to eliminate (limited to no parking, outrageous parking fees, few parking locations). And yes, this includes parking around all of the holy metro park-and-rides or other bus stops.

There should be NO HOUSING allowed in this city that does not accommodate a per unit consideration. Metro is not a solution. It is a tool. A badly abused tool by this one party administration.

I keep thinking this “no parking” housing has a pretty simple solution. First we need a city ordinance that says these types of buildings can only be assigned as many zone stickers as they have parking spots. Then get the neighborhoods around them to have a zone parking restriction.
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This would then make these truly “no car” buildings without 1.5 cars per unit parked out on the street like will actually happen.
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Actually that wouldn’t be a bad idea for all housing. Would stop that wonderful neighbor that only has one parking spot at home from having their 5 cars parked in front of everyone else’s house.

2000 new households per year are expected to be added to Seattle over the next 25 years, and our infrastructure will not accommodate that growth without a solution that prevents 2000 additional cars per year as well. Population growth will everyally make this a transit oriented city, but that change doesn’t happen overnight. It requires us to look forward and start making individual car ownership in the city limits expensive both in terms of money and time. The alternative is gridlock on an ever increasing scale. I hope to see grade-separated rail sooner than later, and hope everyonce calls their legislator and reminds them that continuously dropping the ball on funding for Metro and forcing tax issues on the ballot is shameful and not what they were elected to do.

It’s pretty clear that the other half of the equation doesn’t get enough attention and was alluded to by RT – which is zoning.

The floodgates were opened to high urban density with limited auto accommodation several years back in a number of neighborhoods. Now that it is clear that Metro service is at risk and Sound Transit is decades away from providing relief – the assumptions are no longer valid and zoning needs to be tied to reality.

All it takes is for the people to push back on the Mayor and the Council to tell DPD to turn the tap WAY DOWN until solutions get sorted. This is obviously a political hot potato, but livability is at issue here and the people need to take a stand against the developers who only see $.

Successful urbanization requires a balance between infrastructure and growth. It’s manageable and we have tools for doing just that. Problem is, they’ve been put away like they don’t even exist. Time to call your electeds folks. Demand zoning be revised again while we sort out transpo solutions.

This is disappointing, frustrating and short-sited. I can’t believe anyone can say you don’t need to provide parking for a building of 30-40 units at the same time bus service keeps getting cut. How many people are driving from neighborhoods with service cuts and parking in neighborhoods with better service? I know people were doing it on Avalon Way before they posted those signs limiting how long you can park there. For a lot of problems that get debated, I think to myself there are no easy answers and you can never have everyone in agreement, but this does seem like an easy and logical answer. It seems pretty obviously in everyone’s best long term interest to require multi-unit housing to provide parking. Simple logic, right?

Being curious about the interview logistics, I have two questions for WSB:
– Where did the interview take place (was it a public or private location)?
– Is that a “court reporter” machine I hear being used during the mayor’s responses?

Pibal, regarding your background-info questions:
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*Location: Mayor’s office, 7th floor of City Hall. The other three walls are windows, but when we shoot video, if there is an uncovered window behind the subject, they run the risk of appearing as a faceless silhouette. The chair was at a rectangular table in the center of the office.
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*Clicking sound – Me typing. My co-publisher was not available to come downtown to run our video camera while I asked the questions, so I had to set it up on a static shot and had to type notes via my laptop (I cannot write legible longhand any more) in case, out of my view, the camera quit working (it is getting old and cranky and we’re saving up for a new one). As I was maintaining eye contact with the mayor, the notes aren’t all that legible either (I generally watch the screen since most of my notetaking is at meetings and hearings and there is not a lot to see), so they ultimately did not work as transcription, which I hope to do tomorrow before running one big wrapup with all the links.
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Bonus background point: While arranging this, the mayor’s former press secretary (who was in the room when the interview was conducted last Friday; on Monday, it was announced that she has moved to another job at City Hall) asked me if 15 minutes was enough and I said, no, really, I’d need half an hour. Upon arrival downtown, she told me I had 15 minutes. The mayor gave me a bonus question so it turned into 18 minutes.
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TR

What is the process for obtaining residential parking permits, or time limits, on residential streets? Is that a feasible option, at least in the interim, to deal with our parking problems and hopefully make people further out realize that we need more transportation options?

For everyone that says growth rates can be controlled, yes — on the HOUSING side they can be, IF there was a political will and strong enough desire for both the Mayor and City Council to do that. However…
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What legal power do we think the City actually has to contain or stop JOBS growth? I’ve talked to a lot of people and I have yet to hear a single legally plausible or politically viable way to do that.

WS B&B, it actually ISN’T that simple. It’s not that there shouldn’t be “some” parking required for multi-unit housing, it’s what’s the minimum, given what our infrastructure can support both now and in the future. That calculation has several variables, not the least of which being assumptions about available transpo options, etc.

It’s not uncommon to have no parking for housing in some cities around the world but those generally have more trans options than we do here. The problem is that we’re in a transitional state and there is an imbalance between allowed growth and the infrastructure to support it. And it will take decades to bring back to balance.

I hope that we can forge some consensus on the fact that options WON’T be online for some time and we should zone accordingly.

I don’t care how much it cost a developer they need to provide off street parking for every unit they build “really parking” not this middle of two building shit they have been doing for “town homes/Round house”. Even if I were to take transit to work I will still have a car to go to the mountains, ocean, Portland/Canada, or anywhere else that transit is not feasible.

The elected and appointed officials in all aspects of American politics are severely lacking in competence and vision. What we are seeing in West Seattle is a deluded fantasy perpetuated by urban planners that have no clue what they’re doing. To somehow pin this madness on a single political party is just as naive and foolish as the Seattle city planners thinking that a 30 unit apartment with zero parking is a competent and wise decision. But at least the Democrats in Seattle aren’t trying to close all the Planned Parenthood offices and start an unnecessary war with Vancouver, right Bob?

Is there ANY way to at least document the major points of the response without having to watch a video? Be it for accessibility or other reasons, we can’t all sit and listen to or watch a YouTube video to get the information. I’d love some quick bullets of the major points on things like this, and I can’t be the only one.

Once again real estate development trumps everything in this city including people that ALREADY live here , own property, and pay taxes. Its ABSURD to ASSume that people moving into these new units will not have cars or opt for taking transit just because its close. FOR EXAMPLE that new micro eyesore on North Delridge suddenly has a buttload of extra cars parked on the street ITS OBVIOUS. Sure I get that the idea is to force people to drive less or not have cars at all but all this is about is developers being alowed to get away with spending less and maximizing their take without being responsible to the communities they are raping. F THEM

Bob — I agree with you. Seattle/WA has had a one-sided thought process for years of which you are seeing the result today: overdevelopment in once livable urban neighborhoods, total lack of leadership/vision regarding roadways, freeways, etc.

Joe, who’s saying job growth should be moderated? BTW, it certainly CAN be dramatically influenced via B&O taxes, non-industrial zoning, etc. I’m not suggesting it SHOULD be just that it can and some of that is enforceable in distinct sub-city areas (zoning) versus not (taxation).

I guess I’m not exactly sure what your point is? WS businesses are not employing hundreds of people, they’re employing handfuls by and large, and those tend to be servicing our residents.

“We need to study this” is basically a political way of saying I don’t have an answer for you– a marginally acceptable answer from a recently inaugurated politician. There has to be a lot more grumbling before a politician takes a stand (such as the $15/hr wage discussion).

@Wakeflood, I’m talking about the fairly regular calls for “all new development” and “all new jobs” to be moderated, limited, or shut down city-wide that float around, as if that were even politically (let alone legally in some cases) possible. Short of a dramatic change in the composition and nature of the City Council in 2015’s new District elections I just don’t see a political path forward. Any call for just “West Seattle” to have limited growth would get shut down by the City Council, being completely honest–then what’s to stop other neighborhoods for trying the same?
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I just can’t see a viable political path forward but to push, to push like hell, for expanded and expanding transportation options.

I agree with almost every poster so far. All legitimate posts. While some of us use public transportation Mon-Fri to get to and from work, cars are still necessary if you want to enjoy what this state has to offer. Cars are still going to need to be parked even if transit is an option to get to work. His answer was basically a non-answer. Why can’t we get a decent candidate for mayor? Let’s build, build, build and keep talking about how the transit equation needs to be fixed. Great solution.

I get that it’s a hard pull, Joe. I’m not saying it isn’t. But it’s not impossible – in fact I think it’s crucial – to make the case that WS and for that matter Ballard – have been unduly affected by factors out of our control. Namely, the cancellation of the monorail, limited ingress/egress options that are exacerbated by reductions in metro service, etc.

Making the case that these issues SHOULD be addressed via zoning is a lever. We don’t have many to use and if you drop this one because it looks hard, you’re just buying into the establishment’s mantra. We may not actually GET restrictive zoning but if you scream bloody murder about it, you MIGHT get some mitigation via movement on transit or rail priorities.

What other levers you got handy, dude? What other pressure points do you think can make a difference? If all we have is “insisting that we matter but no more or less than other neighborhoods”, then we’ll be having this same conversation in 2030.

This city will be total gridlock and broke within the next 10yrs if they continue down the road their traveling. They have no common sense with spending habits, positive infrastructure planning and caring about how people will get to and from work. Seattle will be a very one sided city as families, retired, blue collar workers along with the poor will be forced out from taxes, tolls, travel times. Our city government seems to want this by the direction their pushing. They might be book smart but they sure are short on common sense something people use to be born with. Can’t wait for our new waterfront rebuild/park and see if they can hold that to less cost overruns than tunnel, but what’s another billon. If and when they figure out a rail/transit system in/out of W/S it will require a new bridge structure across the Dirty Doo and don’t see that happening for 10yrs and even then would only work for a small percentage of the people living here. This city wants everyone to be like sheep follow the leader spending all your time going to and from work, having no personal life. Don’t need cars just your podment :)

Seattle is like many other cities in this country in that we think in terms of optimizing for commerce and not humans. Think tourism and shopping over livability. Many European cities have spent more of their treasure in the 20th/21st centuries doing growth better than us.

Not necessarily surprising, in some ways, they had to learn that lesson before us as they had less room to spread out to reduce urban pressures than we did. Now we’re hitting those points and fumbling about trying to make up for lost time and with a mindset that hasn’t changed. We already show the schizophrenic tendencies to want something really good and have it yesterday and not pay for it. We can’t even bring ourselves to shake the notion that more retail and restaurants and ferris wheels will somehow make everything work.

I recently tried going without a car for 4 months. I moved 2 blocks from the Junction and figured that I could walk a block to the supermarket, close to other shopping, and have choices of a lot of different buses for work and other trips. For the most part, it went well without a car. Except that every 2 weeks or so I need to run an errand in Wallingford that takes me 1-1/2 hours by 3 buses (each way), and if I drive it takes less than an hour round trip. Then there was the time I wanted to go to a 2 hour long event in Lake City Park, which was going to take nearly 2 hours to get to by bus that day, so I didn’t go. Or that the only way to get to church via bus was to be either 20 minutes late, 40 minutes early, or walk up a very steep hill (which I can’t do). Even though these weren’t daily trips, it became obnoxious enough that I ended up with a car again. Could I manage without the car? Sure. But at what point do you give up quality of life and instead spend all your precious free hours on a bus headed to/from somewhere?

Sue, your errands conundrum are pretty much what rideshare is supposed to remedy? I’d be interested to know if anyone has used them in that fashion and if they thought it was a functional (economically/availability) replacement for owning or just using transit?

Murray’s proven to be an awful – AWFUL mayor so far. His SPD fumble with Bailey and the overturned disciplinary findings – and now the ‘there’s no parking for you peasants, there’s mass transit!’ (essentially saying ‘let them eat cake!’).

Murray’s no improvement over McGinn, and at this point I’d welcome Nickels + Kerlikowski back with open arms.

I don’t buy the excuses, rationalizations and legitimizing amongst some voters, with the claim that they’re “voting for the lesser of 2 evils”. We need more political parties, more candidates, and to distance ourselves from this ‘republican or democrat!’ (or in Seattle, ‘democrat or democrat’) mind frame.

wakeflood, good question. I am a member of both Car2Go and ZipCar, and had hoped that they could be used for those tasks instead of getting a car.
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The one pro with Car2Go is that you can pick it up and drop it off in the home area and be spontaneous – the problem with Car2Go is that you can’t guarantee that there’s one nearby when you want it since you can’t reserve it more than 30 minutes in advance. So I’d need a car, but sometimes can’t get one without a bus ride somewhere. If I truly HAD to have a car for a particular date/time, I could not rely on it. I also had issues where I needed one to return to downtown and could not find anywhere to park it – once I drove around for over half an hour (being charged by minute) to find a parking space that wasn’t 3/4 of a mile from my destination.
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Zipcar lets you reserve them, and there are several 2 blocks from my house. The issue there is that you end up reserving them for way longer than you might need it, because there are penalties for being late with it (especially if someone else has it reserved after you), and you can’t always guess what traffic will be. There’s also a time window for cancellation, so you can’t cancel last minute (it’s several hours ahead of the reservation, I believe). I reserved a Zipcar for a full day one month and it cost me about $100, which is more than I pay per month for my auto insurance. Yes, there are other costs involved in owning my car (even if I rarely drive it), but it seemed almost a wash financially to just own one that I could use all the time than pay $100 every 3 weeks or so for a day of errands. (FYI, the reason I kept it for a full day is that after something like 7 hours it maxes out to the 24 hour rate, so I figured I’d take advantage of the full day.)

Thanks for that education, Sue. It sounds like old school car ownership fits your needs better than the other options. Good on you for trying them before making your decision. Maybe we’ll sort out some enhancements/flexibility of those other options over time and make it fit folks like you better.

Has anyone ever to thought that maybe people with cars will decide NOT to rent apartments in buildings with no parking, and that most of the tenants in thse buildings will end up being people who don’t own cars and use public transportation or car-sharing services.

Sadly, Sue spun her wheels (okay, okay, that was pretty lame), at a significant expense to herself, to discover what is self evident to many/most Seattleites- metro isn’t a viable transit option for the city/region. The minute you need to transfer, you are screwed, time-wise. People value their time and freedom and metro provides neither time savings nor much freedom of movement.

Until there is a sea change, societally, with regard to the use of cars, the head-in-the-clouds-optimism, transit-at-any-cost politics in city hall, the city council and county council will continue to be just wishful thinking. In other words, stop the war on cars and drivers.

The fact that metro is such a turd is why I’m voting no on Prop 1. Somehow ‘saving metro’ has become synonymous with levying more taxes. How many more times do you think we’ll have to ‘save’ metro if prop 1 passes? I’ll bet we’ll be ‘saving’ it every 1 – 3 years.

This is a great development. As a non-car owner, I always find myself renting in buildings with wasted space due to too much parking. This parking isn’t free, and it is very rare indeed for apartments to actually charge the real cost of parking separately. I’m tired of subsidizing the car storage of my neighbors. This study did a good job of showing how wasteful over-building parking is, and how much it costs non-car owning renters:

West Seattle since 1979 my thoughts exactly!
Let’s think this through. Some people don’t own a car and don’t want to so why pay for a parking place which they won’t use. If someone NEEDS a parking place then they wouldn’t even consider renting/buying in a building that offered none. The tenant/owner with a need for parking would be looking at buildings which offer parking. Parking spaces cost money and add to the cost of each unit. Why? It is because of the space they take up is valuable. If one were to buy a condo and want an extra parking space it would cost between $20,000 and $30,000 if there were any available to purchase. It is the same if someone wanted a condo with amenities such as a workout room and pool they wouldn’t mind paying more and getting more. Buildings which have those amenities will have higher rents or homeowners dues. Someone who has no desire to use those facilities would not even consider paying extra for something they won’t use.

A number of people in this thread have repeated the notion that it’s unrealistic to go without a car. Maybe it is, for them. But census data tells us that one sixth of all Seattle households is carless. And there are good reasons to think most carless households aren’t people with single family homes, which means the percentage of apartment dwellers without cars is 20-25%.

What a number of people in this thread seem to be saying is that it should be illegal to cater to that portion of the market, and that we should force those people to rent/buy parking along with their dwelling whether they need it or not–even if it is difficult for them to afford. I don’t understand why people think that’s OK.

There’s no “war” on cars, ramshackle, it’s just that supporting vehicle infrastructure is a black hole sucking up resources infinitely.

It’s a proven fact (yes, it’s been studied for years) that you can’t road build out of congestion. As soon as you pave it, people use it and more people use it and it ends up just as clogged as the old ones were in short order.

Right of way is expensive in urban areas, if you decide to buy it to use for transportation, you need to move way more people than cars can to make it worthwhile.

And that’s not even getting into the CO2 issues.

Bottom line, building roads and parking spaces, etc. is a losing economic proposition in urban spaces.

And I should mention, that it doesn’t take long to see this effect in action. Ever tried to get anywhere in beautiful downtown Bellevue during peak hours? It can take 15 minutes to go from 405 to a parking garage in Bvue Mall, a distance of a half dozen blocks or so. It’s several lanes wider and decades newer than any Seattle downtown streets and still a parking lot.

I’d like to know how many apartment dwellers and homeowners on this thread complaining about parking are parking all their vehicles in their parking space or garage, or using those spaces for something other than what they were intended and parking on the street. Is that why you’re so angry?

” …you can’t, sort of, use a stick hoping people will use transit, unless you provide transit.”

This statement is so offensive. This is how virtually all politicians view us… As cattle to be herded with sticks to wherever they envision is best for us to go. Oh, except they also want us to pay for their vision.

Wakeflood, I don’t know what roads you’re taking, but trying to get to Bellevue Square via NE 8th is a terrible idea any time. You should be getting off 405 a couple exits earlier and using main or getting off 90 in factoria and using the lake hills connector, or even bellevue way since you’ll be moving against the flow of heavy traffic.

You mention one road and there are many ways around it, especially bypassing the 405 mess. The problem with WS is there is only one way in or out from the main city. Transit isn’t going to help and density increases will only exacerbate the problem.

to those who think that perhaps only those who don’t use a car will rent these places without parking spaces, I suggest you maybe succumb to reality. If the price is right, all sorts of people will live there.Even those with cars, of which there are a lot. They will take public transportation during the week to work, and then..well, then on weekends when they want to play, say, go skiing, or go to a mall, or go hiking in our beautiful nearby scenic areas., they will take their car. Want to go to the ocean for a weekend? Need a car. Want to just go for a leisurely drive, say to see the tulips up north…need a car. Canada for the weekend? Again, a car. Where will they park these cars? Well, on the street, of course. And these buildings are all being built in the Alaska Junction area, which is already crowded with cars…people shopping, people eating, farmer’s market on Sunday. And the beat goes on. It’s the real world, not what some would like to see happen. There are only so many places for a car there, and then people like me, disabled, who needs to drive, well…we’ll just stop going. I like spending my dollars locally, but if I can’t park, I don’t go.

JanS, one out of every six households in Seattle has no car, and the percentage is much higher for apartment/condo dwellers. Please stop pretending we don’t exist, and please stop trying to make it illegal for developers to cater to us.